"I wouldn't want to bet our lives on being able to do any given spell as fast as we did invisibility, but. Yes, most disease doesn't work that quickly."

"And while we're working on it we can think of ways to convince medical professionals that we are not high or brain-damaged."

"Starting with a nurse or an intern--I have every respect for nurses, but the fact of the matter is that they aren't as highly paid or high-status--and having an actual demonstration that couldn't be easily faked would probably help."

"Or a paramedic. It might go more or less unnoticed if someone started getting called to a lot of things that 'turned out not to be serious'."

"Oh, that's true." He considers. "Maybe on that note we should try to make a spell that detects the early stages of diseases that kill you but take a long time to do it. Like cancer, but not just cancer. Then we could fix those without the medical profession ever coming into it in such a way that leaves a paper trail."

"It'd be nice, but we don't have a way to filter for at-risk populations and most people don't have cancer. We'd cast it hundreds of times before we found anyone to surreptitiously cure."

"True. Perhaps we can make a wandlight for it and find someone with nothing better to do than flick it on and incant for a while, but, yes, not a high priority."

"I'm wary of plans that involve somebody incanting over and over. If they get sloppy..."

"...Okay, true. Not the best idea, then. Although it might be useful to have a diagnostic spell in general."

"Yeah, then we'd know which diagram and incantation to use. If it weren't obvious what was wrong, as with most serious injuries."

"Yes. Diseases and concussions and internal bleeding and--" he cuts himself off. "It would be useful."

"X-ray magic. To reduce the risk of cancer. ...Which we will be able to cure anyway. But also birth defects which sounds harder."

"And can affect psychological development, I believe, which I am extremely leery of messing with even if the spell wasn't going to backfire on us."

"Oh yeah, definitely. Although magic works on a high enough meta level that I do wonder if we couldn't cure straightforward cases of depression and so on..."

"I suspect patching the symptoms would be easier than curing the problem itself. Perhaps our first students should be people who know things about medicine and psychology and so on rather than middle schoolers."

"Yeah, they'll be able to fill in our knowledge gaps. I agree."

"...I may have some leads on that. There are a handful of nurses who would remember me from when I was eleven, I think."

"Sounds promising. I don't think I'm likely to stand out in the minds of any doctors... maybe the neurologist, but I haven't seen her in years."

"The therapist Dad made him see when he refused to talk to anyone but me after Mom died would probably remember him, but not positively."

"Well, in theory therapists are not supposed to be judgmental about the very traits that keep them in a job, but in practice it's probably worse than a cold start."

"I think it's less that he was judging me for not talking and more that he may not...have the highest opinion of my responsibility. I bit him, once," Kanimir says, wincing.

"You bit him?"

"I was very, very angry. I don't think I quite understood the distinction between being angry at the world for killing my mother and angry at my father for forcing me to be there and angry at the therapist for being there. I did not have a psychologically healthy eleventh year."

"Well, I'm... glad you smoothed out okay from there."

"Yes. But it would probably be best not to involve the poor man. The nurses are fine," he adds. "the bite was an isolated incident and I regretted it even before I had gotten the rest of the way out of my shell. And I was much better company while she was convalescing, in any case."